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- Growing Mondays: Look at the big picture then choose your focus
Growing Mondays: Look at the big picture then choose your focus
Choose what to focus on, and gain momentum on those things
Jo Hunter Adams
April 07, 2025
Hi! I'm Jo, writing from Heart & Soil homestead, a 1-acre homestead in the Far South of Cape Town, South Africa. Every week I share inspiration and education for your growing journey. Thanks so much for reading!
Welcome to Growing Mondays, where I share ideas to help you grow edible and medicinal plants.
Do the best you can until you know better. When you know better, do better.
Adding worm compost to autumn beds
Look at the big picture, then focus on your next steps…and don’t get derailed
My saved pea seed had started to cross (snap peas with shelling peas etc), yielding unpredictable results. So I decided to reboot and buy a batch of seeds, as I do every four years. I bought a tin of pea seed from our local agricultural supply store. Then, when I opened it, the seed was bright pink. Treated seed. Woops.
While I have reservations, I keep to my planting date. I soaked some of the pink off, and planted out my peas on the planned date. My soil guru friend Peter tells me humic acid in worm compost takes care of the ripple effect of fungicide.
The goal is continuous improvement in growing and eating from our homestead. But the how is important: we want to grow joyfully and with curiosity and connection, without burning out or getting neurotic with standards that pull us in too many directions.
The food system is complicated, messy, and full of problems. We are what we eat, but we are also what we think, how we relate, how we reflect and act on the inequality around us, and how we build our community.
In this complexity, I research and set our priorities ahead of time, so that treated seed or buying non-organic food doesn’t derail us. Twice a year I take a few days to weigh the big picture, understand the flows of energy, food, seed, seedlings, and then do the best we can with the capacity we have. Otherwise we risk myopia or paralysis.
I write a note in my planner for six months time to reassess good alternatives for seed for next winter. I know I’m pretty good for saved summer seed. Improving my seed saving skills and giving lots of time to planting from seed for me and for the community are the broader goals.
There is no perfect diet for people and planet, no perfect way to live sustainably. There are thousands of imperfect, beautiful variations. All these variations try to make visible what modern consumerist life renders invisible: the environmental, human and social costs of a middle-class life. The effort to live more sustainably, with small progressive goals every day, is enough.
Here’s to enough and small steps as a collective.
Pink seed heading out at Saturdays workshop.
Workshops
19 April 9-10:30 Medicinal Plant workshop with special guest René Nägeli 7 June 9-10:30 Veg growing workshop 5 July 9-10:30 Kimchi workshop |
I still need a postcard to remind me of my priorities…
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